Pinyon nuts, Disease, and Local knowledge

I visited the Four Corners area, where Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico meet, during pinyon nut season last fall. According to the Teec Nos Pos Trading Post, the 2012 pinyon nut harvest was a bountiful one. I saw people selling nuts from the trunks of Chevy sedans and the tailgates of F150s along the road from Shiprock to Farmington.

The pinyon trees at Natural Bridges National Monument were laden with seeds, which are not technically nuts. I also passed many juniper trees as I walked. We tend to lump the two species together into “P-J” vegetation, but they're quite different. Pinyons have needles and pine cones, like Christmas trees (on the right in the photo). Juniper trees (left) are covered with prickly scales and purple juniper berries, although these are technically cones, too.

Juniper berries give gin its distinctive flavor. Although most gin contains other types of juniper, a microdistillery in Bend, OR makes Desert Juniper Gin from our western berries.

Last fall was the first time I saw pinyon nuts on the trees. The smooth, elegant seeds inside the flared cones reminded me of the complexity of ecological relationships and the diversity of our ecological knowledge.

Four Corners, 1993

In the spring of 1993, a healthy young couple got sick and died in the Four Corners area. What they thought was the flu quickly turned into deadly respiratory distress. When the young woman died, it was a heartbreaking, isolated incident. When her fiancé died a few days later, researchers started looking for a killer.

Investigators found five other healthy young people who had died suddenly. Each was found to have been infected with a previously unrecognized Hantavirus, now called Sin Nombre virus (SNV, “No Name Virus”). The same virus was later found in tissues saved from people who had died of unexplained lung disease dating back to 1959.

Ironically, it’s not the virus itself that destroys the lungs. The body's immune system overreacts and attacks the tiny blood vessels in the lungs, with deadly results.

The first Hantavirus was described in Korea in the early 1950s. All of the known Hantaviruses all are carried by rodents. Researchers were able to pinpoint deer mice (Peromyscus maniculatus) as the carrier of SNV.

Why did SNV erupt in 1993?

Researchers found answers in both modern climate science and traditional ecological knowledge from the Four Corners area and the Pacific coast of South America.

The winter of 1991-1992 was an El Niño winter; it was wetter than usual in the U.S. Southwest. Plants used the extra water to grow vigorously the next summer. Insects thrived on the lush vegetation and laid masses of eggs. The plants and trees, including pinyons, produced large crops of seeds at the end of the summer.

Deer mice, one of the most common rodents in North America, feasted on the insects and seeds. The mice raised extra litters and stored the plentiful seeds for the coming winter. By the next spring, there were so many mice that it was impossible for people to avoid crossing paths with them. Some of the mice carried SNV.

Farmers and fishers in Peru and Bolivia recognized the El Niño weather pattern centuries ago. This periodic warming of the eastern Pacific decimates anchovy and sardine catches and dumps record rainfall on parched lands. Farmers in the area traditionally predict El Niño events by the brightness of stars in the Pleiades.

People living in the Four Corners area recognized previous eruptions of disease after wet years and linked the outbreaks to mice. Now that climate science recognizes the El Niño Southern Oscillation, we know that the previous outbreaks corresponded with El Niño winters.

Beyond Citizen Science

Pinyon nuts and Hantavirus reminded me how often we overlook nonscientists’ ecological knowledge. Although researchers value citizen scientists for routine tasks, the same professionals ignore nonscientists’ problem-solving skills and unique knowledge.

Citizen scientists provide eyes and ears to collect data that can’t be automated. Amateur birders have assembled over a century of data on bird population trends across the country for the Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. Citizen observers record seasonal changes in plants and animals for the National Phenology Network. These data help climate scientists predict how plants and animals will respond to changing climates. Machines can automatically record temperature, wind speed, and humidity, but they can’t watch for the first maple leaves in New England or spot the first robin to return to Minneapolis.

People are also better than computers at seeing patterns in data and images. Although we couldn’t handle the terabytes, petabytes, then exabytes of information without computers, the machines can’t do everything. Citizen scientists comb through NASA data to spot the small anomalies in the brightness of distant stars that indicate the presence of undiscovered planets. People are also better than computers at categorizing images. When researchers asked for help classifying one million galaxies by shape, 150,000 citizen scientists completed the work in three weeks.

Nonscientists excel in research tasks where a willingness to follow directions and a high tolerance for boredom are more important than academic training (which describes most of the work in research). But, when it comes to the developing a list of hypotheses--possible explanations for the mysteries of the universe--you'd better have "M.S." or "Ph.D." after your name.

Tapping the Ecological Knowledge of Nonscientists

Residents of the Four Corners area recognized that disease outbreaks can be linked to wet winters and deer mice. These citizen scientists made observations and discovered a pattern. Although our innate drive to see patterns can sometimes lead us astray (our “lucky” shirt, or our “system” for winning at penny slots), this urge is the basis of science. When we understand cause and effect in the past, we can predict what will happen in the future.

When my friends Jake Weltzin and Steve Archer studied mesquite trees spreading into grasslands, they asked the local ranchers why the vegetation was changing. These researchers tested the ranchers’ hypothesis and found that prairie dogs play a key role in keeping mesquite out of grasslands. Their report, published in the scientific journal, Ecology, said: “This research was the product of discussions with historians and ranchers G. D. and Guy London (born in the early 1900s), who proposed to us that increases in mesquite abundance on their ranch were initiated ‘after we killed all the prairie dogs.’”

When more than a thousand square miles of weedy cheatgrass vanished across in the Intermountain West several years ago, I wanted to know why. I stopped and asked at a ranch next to one of the large bare areas. The rancher told me he had seen army cutworms eating every emerging plant one night (the researchers were all at home at that late hour). Several entomologists laughed when I told them the story, but their colleagues who had also caught the insect larvae in the act didn’t laugh.

A botanist taught me how to recognize Phaseolus--common bean--plants in southern Mexico: Pull off a set of the plant's three leaflets and press them onto your shirt. If the leaves “velcro” themselves to your clothing, you've found Phaseolus and won a bean leaf cluster.

A recent article in the New York Times described how this traditional knowledge could be brought indoors to combat an old plague that’s making a comeback in the U.S. The same hairs that stuck to my shirt also ensnare bed bugs.

I see a pattern here: when researchers ask people how the natural world works, nonscientists can come up with sound hypotheses. When researchers test these hypotheses with careful experiments, the same way they test their own ideas, we add to the body of scientific knowledge and understand our world better.

Researchers, let’s remember to tap the ecological knowledge of nonscientists. They watch and learn the same way scientists do.

Good Riddance to the Great Inversion

Although temperatures are still a bit below normal in Boise, we no longer hear the phrase, "historic cold snap" as part of the forecast. When we hit the upper 50s later this week, I’m going to declare an end to the winter of 2012-13 and say good riddance to the Great Inversion.

Our raw, windy Christmas day turned to snow at dusk. The freeway between Nampa, where I spent the day, and Boise, where I live, was closed: there had been a deadly accident on the icy highway. I crept home on a tractionless and largely deserted side road.

After Christmas, the weather got worse. A large high pressure system moved in over the Pacific Northwest. It brought warm, sunny, dry air that expanded over the existing cold, moist air, trapping it in the valleys. We were socked in tighter than the Republican voting block in the Idaho legislature.

Boise festered at the bottom of the Great Inversion for a month and a half. Day after dismal day, we woke to sinister fog. We dragged ourselves out of bed and fought the urge to go the airport, walk to a ticket counter, and scream, “I don’t care what it costs; get me out of here!” We struggled through a world of suspended ice crystals that pierced our winter jacket-sweater-turtle neck-long underwear layers. We compared notes with coworkers, cashiers, and hairdressers, “I haven’t seen a winter like this in the [fill in the blank with the number of years you’ve lived in Boise] years I’ve been here!” I heard numbers as high as 36. At night, we collapsed in bed, exhausted from the effort of moving through a thousand-foot thick blanket of ice, car exhaust, wood stove smoke, and sugar beet processing plant effluent.

Just after the New Year, I was hurrying to catch the bus, head down, watching for ice on the sidewalk, so I didn't fall and break a bone, or the laptop in my pack. As I passed a small maple tree, I thought I heard a robin chirp. “Wow; the inversion really got to me,” I thought. “I’m having auditory hallucinations of spring.”

Two weeks later, before the sun was up enough for a clear photo, the back yard of my apartment complex swarmed with dozens of flitting, hopping, flapping male robins. They gobbled juniper berries off the trees by the neighbor’s garage. So many birds were jockeying for perches that each one was only able to grab a few of the dusty, purple cones (as botanists call them) before being displaced by another male. Junipers aren’t made for sitting, so the birds fluttered frantically around the edges of the dense, bristly, branches, trying to impersonate hummingbirds long enough to find a landing spot with food nearby.

The flocks of robins returned several more early mornings over the next week. On their last visit, they were reduced to cleaning up previously rejected cones on the ground under the trees.

I wonder how the flocks of robins fared during the Great Inversion. They return every year in mid January and every year it seems to me that they made a poor decision. I noticed them earlier than usual this year and I fear that this year’s trip might have been a fatal mistake for many. This spring, I’ll watch the robins quarrel over nesting territories and listen to them advertise their new digs and search for a mate with more fondness than usual. While the winter of the Great Inversion was trying our sanity, and the strength of our bones when we slipped on the ice, the male robins returned and carried on as usual. They returned and promised us that spring really would come again after all.

Stayman's Winesap Apples

I got out my Imperial Veri-Sharp paring knife with the stainless steel blade. My grandmother would have approved. To her mind, stainless was next to godliness: it lasted forever and was easy to keep clean. As a Trustee of her local hospital in the 1950s, she insisted that all the new sinks be stainless steel.

I selected one of the Stayman's Winesaps. They were my grand- mother’s favorite apple; she said that a “Delicious apple” was an oxymoron. When I learned Otis and Barbara had one of the trees in their Boise backyard, I banished politeness and asked for some of the fruit.

I rinsed off the faint wash of white clay that dulled the apple’s skin. Otis meant to spray the fruit with kaolin clay every two weeks. But he often let a bit more time pass before he got out his hand pump sprayer and applied another coat. Insects hoping for a meal of apples, or to lay eggs in their flesh, don’t like walking or crawling through the clay particles. They leave clay-covered fruits alone.

I cut around the apple’s meridian from the top to the blossom end and back up the other side. Then I trimmed away the stem and the remains of the dried blossom from each half and carefully cut around the core, or pome, which gives apples, pears, and quince their name (“pome fruit”). When she cored an apple, my grandmother left a smooth, shallow dimple. I tend to gouge out uneven divots that take some of the flesh, too: I waste good food. I can still hear my grandmother chide me whenever I reach for a vegetable peeler instead of a knife: “Peelers waste so much.”

She served chicken on one of my visits. I thought I did a fine job of cleaning my plate: I left a pile of bones connected by ligaments, tendons, and a few shreds of meat in the hard-to-reach places. My grandmother reduced her chicken to a pile of clean, dry, disarticulated bones that would have inspired a colony of dermestid beetlesto work longer hours.

Otis had ensured that their tree produced good-sized Stayman’s Winesap apples, so I cut each half into slices. Standing on his tripod orchard ladder, he had thinned the fruit when the developing apples were about the size of one of his fingernails. He removed all but one from each cluster of flowers; if there were still too many fruits along a branch, he removed entire clusters.

Biting into the first slice, I tasted the pink and white perfume of last spring’s apple blossoms. Bee legs tickled the inside of my cheek and a pollen basket might have brushed my tongue. That bee, or another one, must have spilled a few grains of pollen from one of its baskets onto the flower that produced the apple I was eating.

Most of the foods we eat, other than grains (corn, wheat, barley, etc.), must be pollinated by insects, and bees do most of the work. Whenever I see a truck loaded with hives of honeybees on their way to a pollinating job, I can’t resist waving. I wave and I worry about the bees’ dwindling numbers, as Colony Collapse Disorder ravages hives across the country. Researchers don’t completely understand the cause, or treatment, of the disorder: disease, stress, and pesticides are all suspects.

I ate the Stayman's Winesap slowly. All things in moderation; don’t be greedy; live within your means. My grandmother lived within her means. When my brothers and I were kids, she lived in the house her grandfather built in 1873. We assumed everyone’s grandmother had a commode chair with a chamber pot in the downstairs bedroom and a wood-burning range in the kitchen.

When she was 80, my grandmother built a new house, after realizing it would be cheaper than fixing up her old one. Her new house had hardwood floors, marble windowsills, thermal pane windows, a tiled fireplace hearth with a mantelpiece made from a maple tree that grew in her woods, and a small greenhouse off the garage. Her new house did not have a mortgage.

The wood-burning range went into the basement of her new house, “for when the power goes out.” The refrigerator wasn’t worn out yet, so she put it in the basement, too, and stored apples and other fruit in it. As I swallowed the last bite of my first Stayman’s Winesap, I remembered my grandmother's new kitchen. She bought a new fridge, an electric range, and her first dishwasher. The range and the dishwasher were clad in stainless steel.

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More about apples

The apples we see in the grocery store are only a tiny sample of the thousands of varieties that exist. Orchards planted by early European settlers in Idaho contain valuable genetic resources. Learn how this diversity is being cataloged and preserved here.

European honeybees, which travel from orchard to orchard in hives, aren't our only pollinators. Learn more about our 4,000 species of native bees here.

Have a cheatgrass beer and help the Great Basin

Revenge is a dish best served cold: about 45 degrees for amber ales. Tye Morgan has a plan to foil cheatgrass and heal native Great Basin plant communities by brewing beer. She told Ira Flatow about it recently on NPR’s Science Friday .

As an environmental researcher, Tye works to manage cheatgrass in the West. In her off hours, she and her husband Joe are home brewers who teach others how to turn grains, hops, yeast, and water into ales, lagers, and stouts in Reno, Nevada. When she combined her knowledge of how cheatgrass spreads with her love of brewing, Tye came up with a way to restore cheatgrass-invaded areas while producing beer. "Every time people drink our beer, they are doing something to save their desert," she told a local news outlet.

Cheatgrass lives fast and dies young

Conservationists, ranchers, and fire fighters shudder when nonnative cheatgrass dies to form a carpet of tinder in early summer.

Although our native plants also burn, stands of cheatgrass stalks carry flames especially well. What’s more, cheatgrass has already assured its survival by the time fire season rolls around. The plants produce a bumper crop of seeds each spring--up to 65,000 per square meter--that sprout into new plants the following fall.

Our native perennial grasses and sagebrush employ a different strategy. Rather than going through the hot, dry summer as seeds, they hunker down and survive as dormant live plants. Rooted in place, they can't run and are easily killed by fire.

When the ashes and the weather have cooled, cheatgrass seeds blow or hitch rides on fur or socks into burned areas. The seeds soon germinate and grow quickly. The uninvited guests are the only ones at the table, now that the native plants are dead or damaged. Cheatgrass gobbles up soil nutrients to produce the next year’s crop of seeds.

By harvesting cheatgrass seeds each year, Tye hopes to both reduce the number of cheatgrass plants and lower the soil fertility. She believes that repeatedly taking off the nitrogen-rich seeds will reduce the level of this nutrient in the soil. Nitrogen in the soil is like the money in your checking account: if you keep taking it out and spending it, the amount left will drop.

Lower nitrogen fertility will begin to starve out the fast-growing cheatgrass. Our native plants, with their more tortoise-like approach to the race for survival, thrive with lower soil nitrogen. Tye will monitor cheatgrass seeds and soil nutrients to know when to reseed the area with native plants to give them the best chance to develop vigorous stands that keep cheatgrass at bay.

Amber ale and more

Ira Flatow tasted Tye and Joe’s cheatgrass beer and pronounced it "delicious." Tye explained to the Science Friday host that they mix barley with the cheatgrass seeds to brew an amber ale. Barley adds enzymes that cheatgrass lacks, which turn starch in the seeds into sugars. Once the sugars are released, the yeast can convert them into alcohol.

But the couple isn’t satisfied with just one type of beer. Their company, Bromus Tech, is working with Lance Jergensen, an independent malster who specializes in local barleys for niche beers, and Ryan Quinlan, at Great Basin Brewery, to develop several different cheatgrass beers.

Tye points out that agricultural chemicals are rarely used on the rangelands that cheatgrass invades. She plans to use the seeds left after the brewing process to finish organic grass fed beef for market. Soon, you'll be able to have an organic grass-fed cheatgrass-finished burger with your cheatgrass beer.

Once they’ve perfected their line of beers and fine-tuned their restoration techniques, Tye and Joe will share their knowledge with other brewers. Tye envisions small breweries across the West harvesting local cheatgrass and producing delicious beers. "I think that Idaho cheatgrass beer would catch on like wildfire," she told Ira Flatow.

Trapping Miller Moths in Military Reserve, Boise

Miller moths and their army cutworm larvae are well known east of the Rocky Mountains. Although the insects are not as common west of the Rockies, they occasionally reach high numbers. I suspect that army cutworms were at least partly responsible for the “disappearance” of nearly a million acres of cheatgrass in the Intermountain West in 2003. Counting miller moths each fall can tell us how many army cutworms we might have the next spring. If we knew when to expect an outbreak, we could be ready to reseed the bare areas with more desirable plants.

Miller moths and army cutworms east of the Rockies

Miller moths are unwelcome spring and fall visitors to the Front Range in Colorado. Although the insects are familiar pests when they cluster around lights and invade homes, few residents are aware of the impressive trip these tiny creatures make.

The moths that move through Denver and Fort Collins each spring hatched in the soil of the Great Plains the previous winter. The larvae spent the following months hiding in the soil during the day and feeding above ground at night. When active, the larvae eat young plant leaves--sometimes, down to the ground. Emerging fields of wheat, and other plants, are just the right height for the hungry “armies.” After the larvae reach full size, they pupate in the soil. When they emerge as miller moths, they are ready to migrate west.

Although the moths sometimes linger along the Front Range for weeks, their summer home is high elevation slopes of the Greater Yellowstone area. The insects feed on nectar at night and hide among the rocks of cool talus slopes during the day. The moths’ habit of congregating in certain areas makes it easy for grizzly bears to find one of their main foods. At least two popular books have described grizzlies rolling over rocks to feast on miller moths: Cold Case, by Stephen White and Blood Lure, by Nevada Barr. When the weather cools, the moths return to the Great Plains to lay eggs that will hatch the following winter.

Miller moths and army cutworms in the Intermountain West

The winter of 2002-03 was unusually warm and dry around Winnemucca, NV. That spring a BLM employee noticed bare areas where he expected to see cheatgrass. He called the new USGS plant ecologist in Boise to ask what she thought it was. I told him I didn’t know, but I’d take a look.

I didn't find any answers by looking at the miles-wide bare areas. A rancher I stopped to ask said that army cutworms were responsible. He saw larvae “eating every green shoot” on a warm January evening and took some of them to the USDA, where they were identified as army cutworms.

Despite the eyewitness account every entomologist I told the story to laughed: army cutworms couldn’t eat all the plants in an area. It took four months to find another witness, a researcher in northern Utah who saw larvae eating cheatgrass in his field plots. Finally, I found entomologists who had seen army cutworms devouring cheatgrass and young crops in western Colorado and northern New Mexico. I concluded that the rancher in Winnemucca really had seen army cutworm eating cheatgrass.

I suspect that army cutworms were at least partly responsible for the “disappearance” of nearly a million acres of cheatgrass in the Intermountain West in 2003. (Full disclosure: other researchers scoff at the idea.) I hope to learn more about these insects, their distribution, and their migration patterns west of the Rockies.

Although we haven't had a big army cutworm year since 2003, the insects are still present in the Intermountain West and will increase again with the right conditions. As our weather becomes warmer and more variable, the chances of another warm, dry winter increase. Counting miller moths each fall can tell us how many army cutworms we might have the next spring. When we see a lot of miller moths in the fall and then have a warm, dry winter, we should start looking for larvae in early spring.

Trapping Miller Moths in Military Reserve, Boise

If we knew when to expect an outbreak of army cutworms, we could be ready to reseed the bare areas with more desirable plants. The seeded plants would have a head start on the cheatgrass and it would be easier for them to grow into a healthy stand.

I trapped miller moths in Military Reserve, in the foothills of the Boise Front, this fall. Pheromones--scents that female moths make to attract males--lured male moths into the traps.

Julia Grant, Boise's Foothills And Open Space Manager, is collaborating in this work. Julia is using weed-eating goats and kids in soccer cleats to manage weeds and restore burned areas at Military Reserve, one of Boise's open space reserves.

A Warm Welcome in Artic

The sign said, "Please ring the bell." I pulled the cord and the dinner bell rang me back to childhood.

I was seven the year we stayed on our grandmother’s farm for six weeks, while our dad went to summer school at a nearby university. My brothers and I were allowed to ring the dinner bell just once.

A smaller version of the Liberty Bell perched on top of a weathered wooden post in our grandmother's backyard, next to her garden. When our mother was young, before tractors roared in the fields and drowned out other sounds, each farm had a dinner bell near the kitchen door to call workers in from the fields and barn. My brothers and I rang the bell to tell our cousins, who lived on the next farm, that we’d made the two day drive and couldn’t wait to see them.

We took turns pulling on the heavy wire that hung from the crank and released the sound. I don’t remember how many times I was allowed to launch the glorious clang across the garden and the wheat field, around the corners of the hen house and the granary, bouncing off the black walnuts and soft maples in the woods, tickling the ears of the cows grazing in the lane, and bounding across the wooden bridge over the creek, which might have sheltered trolls. But it wasn’t enough.

I hadn’t gotten to ring a dinner bell since.

The dinner bell that asked to be rung was mounted on a rectangular wooden tower. Plants spread from a wooden shelf below the bell, and U.S. and Washington state flags angled out on opposite sides of the structure. I was an adult now, so I only let the bell clang twice.

This time, the sound was swallowed up by the surrounding forest instead of soaring across Indiana farm fields. My hands itched to pull the cord again and again, to punch through the barricade of trees and bounce the joyous sound off the trunks of the Doug firs and Sitka spruce, let it echo across hollow clear cuts, and send it cascading down the rocky gorge of the Little North River nearby.

Before I had an excuse to ring the bell again, a slim woman in narrow blue jeans walked briskly around the corner of the bell tower. She wore a label-less #10 can hanging on a string around her neck.

"I’m glad you rang the bell," she said. "I was in the garden."

Ann, as she introduced herself, opened the office and we went in. She took the can from around her neck and put it on the desk while she checked me in to the campground. I saw raspberries filling a third of the can as I handed her the money. They might have still pulsed with the sugars the plants pumped into them under the summer sun. Ann told me that she and her husband had a large garden and shared its bounty with their guests. The blueberries weren’t quite ripe, but the raspberries were at their peak, and lots of different greens were ready. Greens! I needed greens.

A week earlier, I had escaped Boise’s 100-degree summer for a few days camping and hiking in the dripping moss and swirling fog of the Olympic Peninsula. When I left the national park I followed the blue highway, US 101, south toward Oregon.

I got to Forks, WA 50 miles later, after stopping for coffee to combat the hypnotic effect of the gray sky mirrored in the gray lakes I passed. Forks called itself the “Logging Capital of the World” before the northern spotted owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Forks was the dark vortex of the fight between owls and logging. Bumper stickers in town said, “I love spotted owls fried” and “Shoot an owl, save a logger.”

I had last visited Forks in 2006. I saw logging preserved in the Forks Timber Museum while the town struggled to attract enough tourists to stay alive. People still mourned the lost logging jobs in casual conversations with the few tourists.

Since I last visited, vampires have breathed new life into the town of Forks. Young girls and their families come to see where Bella Swan fell in love with Edward Cullen, a 104-year old vampire who drinks animal, rather than human, blood in the Twilight series of books.

I dug into mole enchiladas at one of the few places on Main Street that didn’t use "Vampire" or "Twilight" in its name. My late lunch could have kept a lumberjack going for two days and it advised a green salad for dinner.

An hour south of Forks, I struggled to keep my eyelids from slamming shut under the weight of mole enchiladas. Could I make it to one of the KoAs near the border with Oregon? There was a private RV park another hour south, at Artic (no "c"). The town had gotten its name through poor penmanship: the founder wrote "Arta," his wife's name, on the paperwork, but the clerk misread his writing. I sighed and tossed the map back on the passenger seat: private RV parks rarely welcome tenters. A women at a park in Oregon had once explained it to me, "Our RVers don’t like tenters."

Still, I glanced at the Artic Park sign as I passed. Wait, there was something else on the sign, below the picture. I turned around and drove back. From the lot of the Artic Tavern next door, I saw "Tenting," and "Bicyclers welcome" at the bottom of the sign. I pulled in and drove down to the office with the bell tower next to it.

While Ann was telling me about the park and garden, her husband Roy, a Garrison Keillor look alike, came into the office. He seconded Ann’s welcome to the park and garden.

Ann showed me the rows of raspberry canes before she went in to start dinner, inviting me to pick a bowl for my breakfast. Although she had been picking the fruit when I arrived, "everyone’s at a different height, so they see different berries." But please leave the Cascade berries, "we use them for wine." The Swiss chard, lettuce, and kale were waiting for me. "And you can add some things from the herb garden." Oregano, fennel, and something lemony. "Anything but the foxglove."

Roy was on the porch lighting the grill as I walked past their house to pick my dinner. I asked about the squirrel that had been dashing up and down the pine trees, cussing me out ever since I pulled in. Roy said it was a Douglas squirrel and that the two of them were on opposite sides of the War of the Bird Feeders. I wished him victory and went on to the garden.

My grandmother’s garden stretched from the dinner bell to the field that was in wheat the year our dad attended summer school. She mulched around the plants with straw to keep the weeds down and conserve soil moisture. I wished the smooth, dark, granular soil could have shown through, to contrast with the tomatoes, green beans, carrots, lettuce, strawberries, and rows of gladiolas. Grandmother often took a sturdy blue vase of the tall "glad" stalks to Quaker meeting on Sunday. I can still picture her walking into the meetinghouse with her determined stride, leaning forward slightly, with a slight hitch of age in each step.

We kids didn’t know what good food was when we stayed with our grandmother that summer. Vegetables and salad greens were obstacles to consume before we could go back to playing with the toad in the back yard, messing around at the creek, or watching the hogs in the barn lot. Home-canned morels were weird looking and gross. Lucky for us, our father didn’t trust his mother-in-law's skill at keying out ascomycetes: he didn’t want us eating those things. My mother and grandmother served themselves a few more.

I picked a sack full of Annie and Roy's greens and herbs for dinner and a bowl of raspberries for breakfast (berries consumed while picking not shown in photo). I tried out my latest Great Idea after I washed the greens: the net bag I had sewn worked great as a camp salad spinner. I sliced baby carrots from the cooler, added olive oil and lime juice, and ate the freshest, most biodiverse dinner I’ve ever had.

After dinner, I sat in my camp chair and wrote about my trip and my grandmother’s dinner bell and garden. As it was getting dark, a white truck pulled a trailer past my site and circled around to a spot on the other side of the loop. A man got out and walked to the office. A moment later, the dinner bell rang.

Roy walked over from the house and I heard him checked in the man and his family. The lights came on in the campground and a pool of light highlighted the two men standing in front of the office door, comparing notes on their travels and lives. They talked so long that the man’s daughter, a little older than I was when I rang my grandmother’s bell, walked up to the office to look for him. She waited for a break in the conversation and asked Roy, "Can I ring the bell?" Roy said, “Sure.” She pulled the cord.

The sound spiraled up from the bell tower to the Douglas squirrel’s nest. He lifted his head, then curled up again and went back to sleep. The sound traveled across the berry canes, salad greens, and herb garden to the forest. The trees didn’t seem to notice the sound, but I did. I was glad she rang the bell more than twice.

I hoped the girl had a grandmother with a dinner bell in her backyard and a farm with a creek beyond the garden. Or was this the first dinner bell she had ever heard? Did she spend her summers indoors, where the only bells she heard were electronic beeps? Had she ever even left her trailer to spend a night in a tent?

One of my earliest memories, a touchstone of my life as a biologist, is the first time our parents took us camping. We spent a night at Interstate Park, near our home in Minneapolis, a year or two before the summer we stayed with our grandmother.

I was enchanted with the stiff, musty canvas pup tent when our dad set it up in the back yard for a trial run. The two end poles kept it upright, more or less, with the help of several jute ropes and stakes. After a day of running on the trails and playing in the potholes at the state park, I was devastated when our parents put me to bed for the night in the car: I’d had my heart set on spending the night outdoors. There was only room for my oldest brother in the tent; my younger brother and I had to sleep closed up in the car.

Many decades later, I still love unrolling my sleeping bag in a tent or on a cot or sand beach. Even if I just spend a week in the next state, I get to escape my quotidian life and relive my childhood yearning to sleep outdoors.

I put my laptop away and walked over to the bathroom, accompanied by a hidden orchestra of crickets. On the way back to my campsite, the stars and the Milky Way astonished me, as they do every clear night I get to camp. I crawled into my sleeping bag and thought about the fresh raspberries I would eat for breakfast.

My Sister-in-Law Crosses Another Thing off Her Bucket List

I baked a red velvet cake for my mother’s 88th birthday. I found most of the ingredients in her cupboards and used up the last of her powdered sugar. The way I see it, using things up and clearing out cupboards at my mother’s house will save me time down the road. She had already cleared out her cake pans and cake carrier, which I borrowed back from my niece.

The cake was one of my most successful creations: dense, bright red layers of buttery sweetness hiding under an innocent white cloak of cream cheese frosting.

My mother and I insisted that my niece and brother take ALL the leftover cake home. My niece took cake home to her roomate, Molly Pan, an actress who is now based in Chicago. My brother took cake home and put it in his refrigerator.

My sister-in-law was up early the next morning to feed her vacation- ing brother’s rabbits before work. She opened the refrigerator, saw red velvet cake, and was back in elementary school.

She stayed home sick from school and got up in the middle of the day. Her mother had already done a half day's work. She was drinking coffee and eating cake.

The young patient's appetite improved. "Can I have some cake"?

"No. No, you can’t have cake for breakfast. You need to have cereal."

"I don’t want cereal. I want cake"!

Tears didn’t produce cake for breakfast; she had cereal. She told herself that someday, she was going to have CAKE for BREAKFAST.

My sister-in-law reached for the red velvet cake and crossed another thing off her bucket list.

Rita Mae's Kitchen

I’m hungry for dinner and longing for a place where no one shouts at me. My ears ring from the audio book on social media that harangued me from my car speakers as I drove east from Lafayette to Morgan City, Louisiana.

“Using social media will make your customers feel appreciated!”

With my tent set up in the city’s Lincoln Park campground, I get in the car again to find WiFi to Google restaurants.

"Using social media will increase customer loyalty and your profits!"

I find the Morgan City Library in the shadow of the City Hall water tower, on a street that ends at the Atchafalaya River. The river is only 25 miles from the Gulf of Mexico and the Morgonians hurry it on its way. A concrete floodwall, taller than some nearby buildings, imprisons the water. Stairs lead up to a walkway on top of the wall, where I expect to see armed guards. Later, I'll find that many of the historical photos on the city’s website show scenes of the area’s worst floods.

A third of the Mississippi River’s water flows down the Atchafalaya through Morgan City. The Old River Control Structure upstream forces two thirds of the water into the Mississippi’s channel. The structure sends it on a longer path through Baton Rouge and New Orleans to the Gulf. If the water had its way, it would escape down the Atchafalaya and take the shortest, steepest path to the ocean. Those who predicted that the Great Mississippi Flood of 2011 would breach the Old River Control Structure were wrong. The structure still stands, for now.

I turn away from the river and head to the library. The low brick building sags under bookshelves so close together I have to turn sideways to walk between them. Plastic grocery bags and boxes of paperback books wait in a corner and shelves along the back wall ooze stacks of newspapers. I move a wooden chair next to an outlet and plug in my laptop.

Rita Mae’s Kitchen has a simple page on morgancitymainstreet.com. They apologize for not serving alcohol and add that they “try to maintain a nice, cozy, and respectable environment for you, the customer.” A review on Urbanspoon says, “Home Cook'N At It's BEST !!!” I head home to Rita Mae’s.

I can almost see the restaurant from the library. Just kitty corner from me is Lawrence Park, which becomes the sound stage for the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival each September. Kitty corner on the other side of the park is Rita Mae’s block. Just past that, U.S. Highway 90 thunders overhead. Travelers on their way to Lafayette or New Orleans can’t stop for slow food.

Rita Mae provides food and comfort in a porched house on Federal Street. The enclosed porch is lined with a counter and stools that look out on angle parking and a snippet of unruly tropical lawn. Just inside the front door, in what had been a living room, I pass the cash register. A note near it reminds, "Don't forget the customer on the porch."

Window air conditioners rattle cool, dry air into each of three rooms. Round and rectangular tables, attended by maroon dinette chairs, invite me to sit down. The TV is on and a newscaster talks quietly. Prayer candles on each table remain unlit, but two Bibles open on a ledge in the corner are well used. Someone has written "Look" in the margin of one and drawn an arrow to Psalm 37. The Psalm tells me not to fret myself because of evildoers.

I sit down at a round table. A young woman comes out of the kitchen and seems surprised to find me. I ask for the smothered okra special on the chalkboard. She disappears again without writing an order ticket.

People were eating at two or three of the other tables. Families talk about school or work and friends catch up since “way too long.” A procession of men and women come in to pick up food to go. A man I later learn is Rita Mae’s son, Harry, brings bags of crab burgers, po’ boys, breaded pork chops, catfish, and seafood gumbo out of the kitchen. He’s a good-sized walking advertisement for the food. Harry greets each person and catches up on their news before they take dinner home to their family

Eating okra reminds me of eating supakanja as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal. The dish stopped me cold the first time I faced it in the communal bowl: slimy okra, lumpy-orange unrefined palm oil, fermented .tree seeds, and dried, smoked fish mashed together and served on top of an otherwise perfectly good bowl of rice. Supakanja and the tropical heat wore me down and I grew to love the strong flavors and distinctive texture.

Rita Mae’s smothered okra and shrimp over rice is supakanja for Americans. The potato salad and toast are packed with calories and love.

A woman in faded jeans and a sleeveless shirt with sweat stains arrives before her food is ready. She recognizes me as a new arrival and helps me understand the area. She tidies up my pronunciation of Ata-, Achl-, Afla-, At-cha-fa-la-ya. Her husband catches crawfish on the At-cha-fa-la-ya and she mows lawns in Morgan City.

Her husband and his helper took a swim when their crawfish boat flipped over that morning. No one was hurt and they saved their $900 catch of crawfish. Last year, 2010, was his best year ever. This year, he was making a fraction as much. "The water went down too fast and the crawfish hardened up too soon," she explains. Her food is ready before I can learn more about hardening crawfish.

Rita Mae serves bread pudding comfort for dessert. I have just enough room left for a serving, but no one asks if I'd like dessert or brings my check. I sit and watch TV while the tide of customers turns from incoming to outgoing.

Some time after it's dark, I realize that satisfied diners just get up and walk to the register, which makes Harry appear in the kitchen doorway. The floor bows in his honor each time he walks past me to ring someone up. I try this approach and Harry appears for me, too. He remembers what I ate and I pay for it; we don’t talk.

Smothered okra isn’t on the chalkboard when I return to Rita Mae’s two nights later. But Harry finds some in the kitchen for me, and adds an extra side of peas. When I thank him later, he says he heard me tell the woman who mowed lawns that I can’t seem to get enough vegetables when I travel. He had peas, so he gave me some.

Since it was my second meal at Rita Mae's, I was treated like family. After I added a good-sized helping of bread pudding to my smothered okra and peas, I topped the evening off with a long conversation with Harry at the register.

He said he tried driving truck Up North a time or two, but it wasn’t for him. The North, or the driving, I couldn’t tell, but it wasn't the work God gave him to do. He was a cook. He cooked on a barge that plied the Intercoastal Waterway. The 3,000 mile-long waterway gives safe passage to barges and private boats traveling between Brownsville, TX and New Jersey. Canals link bays, rivers, and sounds to allow boaters to avoid the dangers of ocean travel. He cooked on oilrigs, where his meals must have been high points in the lives of people with nothing to look at but water. Now, he’s back home in Morgan City, cooking at his family’s restaurant.

I doubt Rita Mae has listened to an audio book on social media. I don’t think she Tweets, blogs, or uses Groupon. She doesn’t need to. The social contract she and her family live is the mighty force that holds society together. This force binds people into groups that create culture, discover art and science, and try to control the waters of the Mississippi River. Rita Mae and her family don’t look for ways to increase their profits; they work to provide good food in a pleasant place. Rita Mae doesn’t make her customers “feel appreciated”; she shows her guests they’re loved. It’s a love powerful enough to endure the waters of the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi combined.

Tenter’s Lament

Every law enforcement officer who has checked my record has found it clean¹.

I’m a well-behaved AARP member (if you overlook the fake address I listed to dodge their blizzard of junk mail). When I camp I'm in my sleeping bag by 9 pm, never have a barking dog in my tent, and only throw rocks at raccoons that are chewing through the strap on my ice chest.

But I’m often the riffraff that campgrounds want to keep out. Especially in Louisiana, where I visited last summer.

I should have been suspicious of the bear story. The high school student in the entrance booth at Kemper Williams Park seemed a bit too happy to tell me that they had closed the tent sites because of a lurking bear. "How about I stay, but I don’t sleep on the bacon"? I asked. She suggested I try Lincoln Park in Morgan City, LA, just down the road.

While I was looking for Lincoln Park on the north side of town, I saw Lake End Park and pulled in (by the third day I realized there was no "Lincoln Park"). It was Kemper Williams’ week to use the bear story, so they let me stay. In a tent site--no tents in the RV sites.

The tent sites are in the corner of the park where the highway makes a right angle turn and the jake brakes roar

Tenters have prime waterfront real estate at Lake End. Right on the green water of the ditch.

Large trees shade the tent sites, protecting us from the icy 80^o breezes off the lake and preserving the mud puddles under the picnic tables and the mold growing in the food spilled on top.

The one women’s shower needs a PSA test right away. You can collect enough water to lather up by rubbing your washcloth along the wall directly below the dribbling shower head. After a good lather, just rub yourself back and forth on the wall to rinse off.

Your clean clothes, dirty clothes, towel, and toiletries hanging on the single hook or slung over the stall door are in no danger of being splashed.

The only fan in the women’s bathroom/shower was small, disassembled, and stationary when I visited. Getting ready in the morning took longer than usual because I had to make periodic trips outside into the lower (80%) humidity to let enough sweat evaporate off my face that the next layer of makeup would stick to it.

I brought performance art to Lake End Park. A cloud of golf carts had hitched rides into the park with the RVs. A parade of low-rider carts, lights blazing and music pumping, circled around and around at dusk and beyond. The drivers toured the parking lots and recircled through the parking area in front of the tent sites. Cart after noisy cart slowed and heads swiveled to watch me feeding and grooming myself in my native habitat.

In the mornings a foot parade of retired Morganites perambulated the park. They strode the path behind the tent sites and only watched out of the corner of their eye. I said good morning to one septuagenarian and heard his complete medical history in reply.

On a day trip to Cocodrie, LA I looked for a campground with fewer

spectators. I searched for tent sites in Amelia and Gibson, then turned on to Bayou Black Drive. I pulled into every campground along the necklace of lots clinging to the ribbon of raised road bed between Gibson and the outskirts of Houma.

I assured each campground owner that the parish sheriff hadn’t been summoned to Palmetto Island or Lake Fausse Pointe State Parks, where I'd stayed the previous week. I reminded them of my clean record ("never convicted"), gave them my Dun’s number, and cited my stratospheric credit score. I offered college transcripts and a letter from my mother. No dice; no tenters.

On my last morning at Lake End I took a walk over to the RVers side of the park and fell down a marsh rabbit hole. As I tumbled, I saw breezy RV sites next to the lake

and partially shaded ones nearby.

I bumped my head as I careened down the rabbit hole and saw a large building with restrooms. I went in and turned on one of the many showers. I jumped back as a torrent of water gushed past me.

I caught a glimpse of dual vents in the ceiling

and heard the roar of ventilation fans as I stepped back outside.

I woke up and hit the road to Slidell, LA, which doesn't seem to have crosswalks or pedestrian crossing signals. I stayed in the Motel 6 and no one watched me.

I never found a private campground in Louisiana that would let me spend the night. Lake End is a city park and the other places I stayed were state parks.

State and federal campgrounds allow tenters and RVers access to all sites and facilities. But there's a whole lot of real estate without these public services, especially in the eastern U.S. Lake End Park has the greatest contrast between RV and tent sites and facilities that I’ve seen, but the pattern is familiar. Private campgrounds that allow tenters usually sequester them in the noisiest, muddiest, dankest corner, as far away from the quiet, peaceful, dry RV sites as possible. When tenters’ facilities are separate, they are not equal; they are separate and unequal.

Update

My visit to Louisiana made me think that tenters are being discriminated against. Now I wonder if there's something about me that campgrounds don't like: Am I not supposed to be still camping at my age? When I'm pleasant to the attendant at check-in, do I seem like a push-over who won't complain? (Well, OK, that last part's true. But I have a blog now.)

Last month I hit Tillamook, Oregon the same week as the County Fair. I finally found a tent site at the Tillamook/Bay City RV Park. The attendant was sorry to tell me that the only tent site she had was "a narrow one." "Narrow" being less than 10 feet wide. She didn’t mention that the "narrow" site was in the farthest corner of the park by the highway intersection or that it was less than 10 feet from the sewage outfall, where every night-time toilet flush would echo up the casing.

The next morning there were still several unoccupied spacious tent sites away from the highway and sewage outfall. There must have been a terrible highway accident to prevent that many people from making it to their reserved sites. I'm surprised I didn't hear the sirens--I was right next to the highway.

But please don't think that my narrow site was completely lacking in amenities. It did have artwork.

Footnote

¹When three county sheriff’s deputies converged on me last April I was pulling weeds on my mother’s farm. My family has been pulling weeds there for 147 years. We’re not done yet.

Finding Senegal in St. Martinville

As a Peace Corps Volunteer I found part of Europe just off the coast of Africa. I caught the chaloupe on the waterfront in Dakar, Senegal, chugged out a couple miles, and landed on Gorée Island. I traded diesel-fueled congestion and constant attention from traders and potential marriage partners (or partners of a more informal nature) for nearly deserted sandy paths between bougainvillea-draped villas and prim bistros along Gorée’s calm harbor.

Last summer I found part of Senegal in St. Martinville, Louisiana.

I camped at Lake Fausse Pointe State Park nearby and spent a few days exploring the town of 6,000 on the banks of Bayou Teche.

The St. Martinville Historic District includes buildings that date to the 1800s, a large oak, and a much-visited grave that might or might not have a person in it.

The African American Museum is shaded by the Evangeline Oak and overlooks the Teche. At the first display I traded wrought iron balconies and live oaks for a kora (stringed musical instrument) and kel (large mixing bowl made from half an outsized gourd). When you want to compliment a Senegalese cook you tell her that your stomach is as full as a kel.

A photograph of men eating cheeb u jen (rice and fish) transported me to lunch at the communal bowl in the deep shade of my Senegalese family’s neem tree.

Many of St. Martinville’s earliest non-Native American residents were African slaves, some of whom might well have spent time in Gorée’s Slave House. The Louisiana town recognized this connection by becoming a sister city of Gorée Island.

Spidery 17th century script in an open ledger at the museum revealed the names of a dozen ships that traveled the Middle Passage with human cargo. The display noted that survival rates were higher on French ships than on British, due to better care for passengers.

I browsed the young readers’ shelf in a corner and ran across a book about Senegal, part of the Enchantment of the World series. In grade school I had been enchanted by a story in Young Miss magazine about a woman who went to Africa with the Peace Corps. I saved the article for years: I was going to join the Peace Corps and go to Africa.

I left St. Martinville that evening as a pink flamingo sunset painted mounds of clouds with color. I turned on to progressively smaller roads that wound through ever-smaller towns. The first homes were brick and had Greek columns. A man struggled to the curb with a tub of grass clippings from a lawn that could have produced a good amount of beef.

Farther on manufactured homes sprouted above ground swimming pools or a lawn-scale forest of columns topped with colored metal balls. As the road lost all pretense of shoulders the mobile homes no longer aspired to manufactured status, then surrendered to a burned out shell with tan insulation oozing out of its carcass. Finally, an ancient school bus colluded with a lean-to of found materials with a corrugated metal roof.

Somewhere between manufactured and oozing, the Thistle and Shamrock came on NPR. I turned up the volume as the first song started. I expected the fiddles and pipes of Scottish or Irish music, but African rhythms and Youssou N’Dour filled the car. That day the show started with A United Earth, by Youssou N'Dour and Alan Stivell.

Youssou N'dour released his fourth album, Giande (The Lion), the year I arrived in Senegal. Giande and Set (Clean), his next album, were the sound track for my Peace Corps experience. When one of my trips to Dakar for a periodic gamma globulin shot coincided with N'dour being in residence, he serenaded me, and everyone else not sleeping in Fann Hock, from his nearby nightclub until nearly dawn.

N'dour is still making music and I'm still buying his albums. But I no longer buy them as cassette tapes from a box balanced on the head of a music seller on the Ponty, in Dakar.

By the time I pulled back into my campsite at Lake Fausse Pointe I had traveled much more than the 25 mile round trip shown on the odometer.